What You Need To Know From SMX Advanced

Anyone following the industry may have noticed the overwhelming
coverage of SMX Advanced earlier this month. A relative newcomer to the
conference circuit, SMX has quickly become a sweetheart of show goers.
Advanced was billed as an expert-level search engine marketing education
and exhibition event, featuring sessions for fluent and experienced
SEOs, SEMs and Web developers.

The discussions following previous expert-level events have included
criticisms that the info shared was not advanced enough, or perhaps, not
advanced at all. Most marketers who attended this year's event strayed
from such criticisms, recognizing the new and innovative techniques
presented by speakers - regardless of whether or not they would ever use
those techniques on their own or their clients' sites.

On the Bruce Clay blog, writers Lisa Barone and I liveblogged 15 of
those sessions across the four tracks: Organic Search, Paid Search, SEM
Business and Developer Day. If you weren't able to attend the
conference, you may want to head over to the blog to see if anything
catches your eye.

However, there were several sessions that were considered
highly-valuable. There were also sessions/topics that, since the
publication of speakers' PowerPoint presentations, can be expanded upon.
I know that I frequently couldn't record all of the info presented on
longer slides or by fast talkers, so some of the topics deserve some
additional coverage. For that reason, this recap of SMX Advanced is also
a roundup and addendum.

Analytics Every SEO Needs to Know
One of the most commended sessions of the event, attendees seemed to
agree that the offerings of this organic track session fell safely
within the advanced category. Unfortunately, some points were left out
of the blog coverage due to this writer's late arrival and speedy
presenters.

Jonah Stein's presentation focused on "five forgotten metrics." The
final metric was to query all stats in Webmaster Central. The problem
for most, however, is that the stats are presented in an unreadable
format. For this problem, Jonah recommended a converter.

Amazing New PPC Tactics
On the blog we received a comment from a reader who would like to see
more content like Addie Conner's presentation. Along those lines, there
were points in Addie's presentation that did not make it to the blog.

She started her presentation by defining some terms she uses. Account
structure is the organization of accounts within a multi-account
strategy. Inter-campaign structure is the organization across multiple
campaigns of an account, and intra-campaign structure is the
organization of ad groups within a campaign. She presented a graphic of
keyword types to consider when developing an account structure.
Relevant, behavioral and irrelevant keyword types align with immediate
seekers, contextual finders and new interest, respectively. High traffic
and low traffic align with head and long tail keywords, respectively.
In terms of the search engine, along with the inter-campaign
considerations to keep in mind, Addie also outlined intra-campaign
considerations:

There doesn't appear to be any alternate coverage of this session.
Most likely, the other bloggers were at the Give It Up session that was
going on at the same time.

What You Should Be Measuring - But Aren't
There were several useful topics discussed during this paid search
session. Notably, Christine Churchill's talked about measuring offline
conversions. Simple, intermediate and advanced methods were all
explained and can be reviewed at the Bruce Clay blog. Also of value to
readers may be Rich Devine's presentation on monetization modeling. Our
little blogger fingers couldn't catch the info as fast as Rich was
throwing it, so the following are his tips for building a monetization
model that weren't relayed on the blog:

Confirm your business goals. Ask yourself, what are the goods of
first and second intent, and what is the core business objective you're
trying to achieve?

Align your site goals according to your answers to the above questions.

You&A With Matt Cutts
Everyone always loves a little Q&A time with search's moral compass,
Matt Cutts. Danny Sullivan said he will be making the full video of the
interview with the head of Google's Webspam Team available soon. In the
meantime, you can find the essence of Matt, Danny and the audience's
discussion on the Bruce Clay blog coverage as well as at Search Engine Roundtable, The Cubicle Punk, and Matt's SMX Advanced 2008 Wrap-up post. During the Q&A, Matt explains why Google penalized the Lyndoman linkbait
- a fake news story about a 13-year-old who had used his father's
credit card to buy hookers. The story was quickly picked up by major news outlets
and wasn't disclosed as fake until weeks later. Matt said that the
penalty was the result of the fact that the story was meant to deceive
users, and that not taking action would have been irresponsible on
Google's part. Other topics discussed included paid links, widgetbait,
form crawling, different penalties, Google's new first click free feature, and a bit about PageRank sculpting.

Black Hat Tactics Represented at SMX Advanced
One of the hot discussion points following the conference was whether or
not the content presented at SMX Advanced fell too far on the dark side
of the SEO fence and whether or not that is the direction the industry
is leaning in general. Check out this newsletter's Hot Topic for links
to posts about Danny's intentions and the wider industry's opinions. The
comments following the aforementioned posts are also worth giving a
look.

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